SolaceClub

A Tool to address the world's first probleM: grief

Team: Steven Albert, Sarah Glanville, Lyra Wilde

Time: 2.5 weeks

Role:  competitive analysis, survey design, interviews, persona development, illustration, prototyping, writing

Tools: Pen and Paper, Paper 53, Sketch, Invision    

Challenge: Our challenge was to provide a streamlined welcoming process to facilitate potential members joining the community, and to structure the support of bereaved community members through access to subscription sponsorship and other non-monetized gestures. Additionally, we needed to define the user roles “Support Coordinator” and “Support Team Member” in terms of need and task management.

Solution: A platform for onboarding support coordinators and support team members that is welcoming and allows collaborative task management and delegation for crowdsourcing support.

Deliverable: An onboarding design for SolaceClub: A series of questions and images (process) that guide new users or support coordinators to the actions they can take within SolaceClub to support their loved one. Additionally, this project generated data/findings to inform further design iteration.

Support is 'love in action’

In our first meeting with Solace Club's founders, they explained that the desire to make a grief support tool had been inspired by their own experiences with grief. While there was no shortage of people wanting to express support, the lack of clarity about how to support a particular bereaved person inhibited support for the bereaved, and placed a great deal of the responsibility for support on one or two people-- often people impacted themselves-- close to the bereaved.

One thing we understood from the beginning of our process was that since we were designing Solace Club's onboarding, we were in a sense developing the way in to a tool, and would need to communicate the value of the service itself, in its totality. As terrifying as it sounded, we were tasked with ensuring that potential users would entrust SolaceClub to facilitate support for their loved ones during the most difficult experience in life.

The Competitive landscape

SolaceClub's holistic approach to grief support differed from any product we researched. As such, there is no direct competitor. However, products across multiple markets feature components of SolaceClub's offerings. As part of our preliminary research, we analyzed thirty-two companies, ranging from emotional support tools to cosmetics subscriptions, to assess existing products in terms of concept design, structure, and specific features. We created a matrix of the features and functions across all of these tools and zeroed in on the components a given tool appeared to have designed well. This helped to inform and contextualize our initial design decisions and was another deliverable for SolaceClub's overall product development.

DESIGNING THE interviews

The most helpful component of our research came from our interviews. After developing a questionnaire to recruit our interview subjects, we selected 17 subjects representing a range of bereavement experiences and roles. We developed a series of closed and open-ended interview questions to help us understand people’s experiences around grief. As you might imagine, we had a lot to consider in our approach to such sensitive subject matter. We scheduled our interviews with a fair amount of buffer, knowing our subjects would likely need time to shift through the emerging emotions.

• We asked people to share their experiences around death, loss, and mourning - the most difficult things anyone has to deal with in life.

• We asked themed questions about how support was offered and received and the ways in which that support succeeded or failed the bereaved.

• We intentionally included questions about spirituality, gender, culture, and family systems and how they tied into this experience.

Key Quotes

As we transcribed our interviews, we pulled quotes that seemed to be instrumental themes, particularly those that expressed thoughts and feelings echoed by multiple interview participants:

“Decisions were just made out of necessity, and the whole family was needing support.”

“You're never prepared for death— even when things don't look good, you always hope for healing.”

"We made a photo-collage from all the photos people sent. Little treasures I'd never seen! I keep a picture of it in my phone."

"We went out to a basketball court and smashed plates. People yelled whatever they needed to release/communicate to the person they'd lost."

Affinity mapping

We all pulled notable quotes from the interviews and categorized them by emergent themes. Some of these were:

• Spirituality +-

• Gender

• Misguided support efforts

• Effective support efforts

• Unhelpful gestures

• Gifts and responses to them

• Monetary gifts

• Coordination of Support

• Communication

• Wishes

• Humor

• Long-term impacts of the bereavement experience

Notably, we found that the most meaningful gestures of support were heartfelt messages to the bereaved and specific, thoughtful gifts. Activities that engaged the bereaved- cathartic releases, like the plate smashing, and creative collaborations, like the photo collage- were also potent.

We also identified failures in support systems. Individual members of family systems often needed different kinds of support and were often unable to reach out. Depending on the dynamics between the bereaved and a particular spiritual community, spirituality could be received as either incredibly healing or coercive and wounding.

Personas

We knew that in order to develop the right onboarding experience, we needed to understand who the 'support coordinator' was. We were asked to develop a support coordinator persona, and we identified our primary persona, Allison, based on the synthesis of data from our interviews. Based on our data, we knew her to be someone close enough to the bereaved to want to help significantly but with enough objectivity to organize an effective support effort. We understood the challenges that faced competent nurturers like Allison, who were frequently over-taxed in emotional crises. We wanted to help deliver something that would not overwhelm her with decisions and a vast organizing effort at such a difficult time.

                                       Allison: Support Coordinator

Needs:

• To make her efforts truly supportive to honor her sister-in-law

• To help the crowdsourcing effort with contacts/resources

• Different kinds of support in the coming months

• Unifying gifts/activities for family

Pain-Points:

• Grieving herself

• Has been overwhelmed by responsibility in the past

• Too much effort to onboard/administrate efforts like this in the past

 David:Bereaved

Needs:

• reassurance that his sons’ needs are addressed--practically and emotionally

• privacy and support

• activities with friends that get him out of the house (but not ready for big groups)

• legal/financial resources for later & some financial support now

Pain-Points:

• wife was primary earner

• very fragile, not ready for big groups

  A Support system is a system

In fact, we developed a whole community persona system, which my teammate, Lyra Wilde, intuited as orbiting David at a time when his connection with Beatrice is forever altered. To create this model, we created personas for each family member, using this to anticipate how dynamics might influence their roles and needs. Understanding this dynamic system, where people's busy lives intersect and separate in cycles, can facilitate support through a thoughtful design. This visualization would not have been possible had we not used the insights we'd gained from our interviews to anticipate how individual relationships in this dynamic system could interact to generate a natural support system.

iterating for delivery

By now, our team felt we'd understood what we were facing and moved from our discovery phase into iterations toward delivery. Before creating even the roughest paper prototype, we needed to define what our deliverable would (and wouldn't) do. We did extensive whiteboarding to delineate our "MoSCoW" (Must, Should, Could, Won't) and some early iterations of the flow. We determined many of the design deliverables through this process.

The Flow And Early prototype tests

This was the flow we originally came up with. We knew that Support Organizers like Allison might onboard with a particular form of support in mind, but their immediate support needs might vary. We determined that Support Organizers would need a way to start the onboarding process and then set up a crowdfunding campaign or other support options consecutively. Though we implied a dashboard in our early paper prototypes, we missed it in our first wireframes. The result created confusion and ran counter to our goal of reducing stress during onboarding. Our testers were baffled by a long, seemingly circular process and felt they repeated a form twice.

the right flow

Once we spotted this error, we were well on our way. This was a project with an extensive exploratory research component, and we had gone deep into understanding the complexities of our user needs. We initially stumbled in envisioning the onboarding flow for a tool that was still in the discovery phase of development. The inclusion of a global dashboard from which alternate flows were possible prevented users from committing to a tedious process without a roadmap and more effectively allowed user's individual priorities to guide their onboarding process.

The outcome: Presenting our findings

When we delivered our mid-fidelity wireframes to the clients, we had made at least one bold design decision. We were very excited to present our work and hoped that our process would translate in a meaningful way to a skilled engineer and a Psychologist. One feature we were concerned might not be received well was the inclusion of a personality-typing feature that was based on Jungian archetypes and the four 'elements.' We made the decision to test this feature because we were interested in determining if personality profiles could result in meaningful suggestions around support and empowering those in grief by providing a framework within which to begin taking action. The feature had tested favorably in our first sprint, though we had made sure to keep it as an optional feature in case it didn't resonate with certain users. To our relief, our clients received it with enthusiasm. They told us they had already been considering how to integrate something like this into the design. We were also pleased that our clients understood the relevance of the research and intended to use it to inform the product design as a whole.